Gillespie welcomes back business teacher after amputation

GILLESPIE — Andy Easton has dedicated his career to teaching his students about independence.

No wonder he regained his so quickly. Even without his legs.

Gillespie High School welcomed Easton back to the classroom on Monday.

A sour stomach, a drive for medication and a wrong turn behind the wheel in November 2011 had cost the business teacher nearly three years with his students. Easton woke up after the accident in a hospital bed. He wasn’t in his classroom teaching his students to invest in stocks, strive for financial independence and create budgets. He wasn’t on the sidelines coaching. He wouldn’t be running the court or field any time soon, or really ever again. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

“When you first wake up and you find out that you’re paralyzed, you wonder whether living is an important part of what you need to do,” Easton said. “For the first three days that I was awake, that was the approach… Then I thought, ‘You are where you are, let’s get up, let’s get after it and make the best of it.’”

Easton, who started teaching in 1979, entered his classroom Monday morning riding a scooter. A black towel covered the area where his legs had once helped him stand more than 6 feet tall. He’d returned briefly to the classroom for the 2013-14 school year until bedsores prompted a double-leg amputation.

Still, Easton had vowed to come back. He began class Monday with a light heart and a smile.

“I’m a little shorter than I was last year,” Easton told his first-hour class. The amputation had taken about 2 feet of his height.

“It’s good to be back,” Easton continued. “Last year, I made it five weeks. Hopefully it will be a lot longer this time.”

He pulled his scooter up to his computer screen and began flipping through Powerpoint slides for his consumer education class. The computerized lessons were one of many tools keeping him in the classroom. Had he lost his legs when he began teaching in 1979, he never could have managed a chalkboard.

Took toll on district

Easton enjoys teaching his students the language of business, and he’d waited three years to do it again. With the click of each mouse, the new students read aloud facts and statistics about the business world — the average teenager spends $4,370 per year, 76 percent of Americans do not stick to a budget, and that today’s high school graduates are projected to earn more than $1 million in their lifetimes. He explored these concepts that they could relate to before dipping into unfamiliar terms like macroeconomics, income tax and supply and demand.

“When you know what you’re doing, you’re going to be more confident, and when you execute it, you’re going to be more satisfied,” Easton told his class. “All of these things will impact your life, and the most important thing to know is how to protect me and mine.”

Page 2 of 3 - That undeniable passion for his students and their wellbeing shines through his lessons and the school as a whole. Superintendent Joe Tieman said Easton’s accident took a noticeable toll on the district. Community members rallied together afterward, hosting fundraisers to ease some of the medical costs and wore wristbands honoring the beloved coach and teacher. The bracelets read “Team Easton — you know the drill,” which was one of Easton’s famous sayings.

The district kept his job open throughout the ordeal. Tieman would check in with the recovering business teacher every month or so and was always met with Easton’s same mantra: “I am a teacher, and I will teach.” In the past three years, Easton put just as much heart into getting back to his students as he did to helping them succeed academically and athletically.

“He overcame those odds when honestly he could have just said ‘it’s not worth the fight,’” Tieman said. “It’s not like Andy’s 25 years old. This is a guy who could have just said, ‘It’s too much of a hassle, and it’s too long of a journey.’ He had setback after setback.”

‘All about the kids’

Among those setbacks is his inability to coach.

Easton’s enthusiastic yet demanding voice has boomed on the sidelines for hundreds of athletes in central Illinois as a coach for the Pana, Taylorville, Litchfield, Carlinville and Gillespie school districts. Don Borgini, who coached football with Easton at Gillespie, said his colleague has passion for studying games and a unique ability to inspire athletes of all ages in a variety of sports.

“It’s all about the kids and finding the way to teach them and motivate them,” Borgini said. “I really think you could have him teach Tiddlywinks, and he’d do a great job with it.”

Easton’s dedication to athletics appeared again not long after his accident. He had been coaching girls’ basketball that season, and even in his condition, made a brief guest appearance at a pep rally to support them. The girls left the stands and flocked to their coach.

“His mental toughness and his enthusiasm in the face of adversity, those are some of life’s best lessons,” Borgini said. “You have to learn to recover and get up and go to work every day. He is a living legend here for that.”

Even without his legs Easton still intends to give his all to the athletic programs. His immobility won’t keep him from noticing the way a ball spins or faulty form in a stance. He intends to pitch in with junior high girls’ basketball or with athletics at the Ageless fitness center in town.

That passion resonates in the small corner of his chalkboard, where seven members of the middle school girls’ track team smile up from a 2011 photograph. Their coach still towers over them in the picture. That spring was one of the last seasons before he lost use of his legs. They’d gone all the way to state together.

Page 3 of 3 - Junior Lynsey Gibson was on the track team that season. She hadn’t gone out for track in sixth grade, but he helped her catch up to the rest of the girls. She knew he wanted her to succeed, and she did.

“He could still coach me today if I really needed him to,” Gibson said. “If I have him there by my side telling me things to do, it just makes everything better.”

Focused on others

Gibson’s name now sits on his consumer education class list instead of his track roster. She’s thrilled to have her old coach back in the building, noting that his outgoing and approachable attitude hasn’t shifted. The man hasn’t changed, even if the way he moves around has.

Easton doesn’t gripe about his immobility, focusing instead on what teachers do — helping their students.

“You have another opportunity today to make yourself better and do something for somebody else,” Easton said. “When you keep your eyes on yourself, you become very limited.”

That begins with creating a lesson plan that teaches his students the money skills they need to function in life, and often it ends with relating to them. Monday, he asked the students in his first-period class to introduce themselves and to say one exciting thing they did this summer. Two of his students mentioned getting their driver’s license.

Easton laughed and told them he’d earned his license, too. In three years, he’d gone from being completely bedridden to driving a van and learning to get in and out on his own.

“No matter where you went and when you went, you can always get back to where you want,” Easton said. “I knew I was going back. There was never a doubt that I was going to figure out a way to get back.”